PRINTQ&A with Almudena Carracedo
Courtesy of madeinla.com/press/materials
Almudena Carracedo won an Emmy for her film Made in L.A. , which will screen at the Citizen Jane Film Festival at Stephens College Oct. 17-19.
October 9, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Almudena Carracedo accepted an Emmy Award Sept. 22 for her film Made in L.A. for Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story-Long Form and will be showing it at the Citizen Jane Film Festival Oct. 17-19. Made in L.A. tells the story of immigrant women working in a sweatshop in Los Angeles for popular clothing retailer Forever 21. The film follows the women as they rally to gain more rights and get their voices heard.
How did you get into film?
Related ArticlesI studied film studies and television in Spain, and so I was very active in organizations and things in the community. Then I started working in television. I applied for a fellowship to come to UCLA to work on my Ph.D., which I didn’t finish because I started making documentaries.
How long have you been working in TV and film?
Even during my university years, I was doing videos and things like that, but the professional stage of my documentary filmmaking is about eight years old.
What was the process of making Made in L.A. like?
In the summer of 2001, I read a story about sweatshops in Los Angeles. I was struck by the fact that it was mostly immigrant workers and mostly women who were doing this work. Initially, I started doing a little short documentary that the workers could use in their organizing efforts in involving other workers in the struggle and in their education. When I got to the center, the women had just started a boycott campaign against a major clothing retailer, Forever 21. I worked with the women following their campaign to New York and Washington, and I realized that the organizing that they were doing was impacting their personal lives and their sense of worth, their self-esteem and their identity, as immigrants but also as women. A year into the film I realized that it was much bigger than a film about immigrant workers — that it was a film about the need to claim their rights, to fight, the struggle to find your own voice and your place in society. It’s not an activist film; what it does is put a human face on issues that people normally talk about in numbers.
How long did it take to produce the film?
The film took five and a half years to make. The first four years we didn’t have full funding, so it was pretty much the community supporting the film through a lot of house parties. We ended up broadcasting the film on PBS the day after Labor Day last year when they did a special highlighting the struggle of immigrant workers in this country.
So what do you have planned next?
Since we finished the film, we are engaged in an outreach campaign where we’re bringing the film around the country and creating a dialogue around the issues in the film like immigrant rights, women’s rights, labor rights [and] globalization. It is very beautiful to share the film with the audience and help to create a dialogue around this issue. And that’s one of the reasons we’re coming to Columbia.
What inspires and motivates you?
I am from Spain and I’ve been here for eight years, so I very much understand some of the issues that immigrant workers are experiencing here. And there is something very emotional about the film. It is able to connect the experience of immigrants today with the experiences of immigrants to this country throughout its history. There’s actually a scene in the film where a woman, Lupe, goes to Ellis Island. It really touches people’s hearts because they realize that their parents, their grandparents and their great-grandparents were like Lupe.
Why did you decide to go into documentaries?
From my point of view, documentaries are able to provide a human face to a lot of these issues. I think that if people were able to talk to each other, a lot of the stereotypes would disappear. So we can only hope that the film will help with this national dialogue from a much more human perspective.
How do you feel about being a women in the film industry, and have you endured any hardships because of it?
There are probably more women in documentary than there are in narrative film. The fact is that women can grab a camera and start documenting things that happen around them, and they don’t need anyone’s approval to do that. I think being a woman allowed me to enter the lives of the women in the film. Because I’m a woman, because I spoke Spanish with them and because I shared some of the immigrant experiences that they’d had. So in that sense I think it has allowed me to create that kind of personal, intimate connection that a documentary filmmaker needs to create with their subject.
What else do you do?
There is no life outside of filmmaking. It is a joke, but it is partially true. I think when you work on a documentary, you work on the issues because you’re passionate about them. You don’t go into documentary because you are trying to get rich.
